In The Driver’s Seat

During the pandemic, drive-in theaters became big business again. And the one in Ocala was among the group keeping the gigantic screens lit and the popcorn piping hot.

By Richard Anguiano • Photos by John Jernigan

John Watzke has made it through 64 years—about 50 in the movie theater business— living by a simple rule. Think fast and adjust fast.

It helped him survive the first of two catastrophes, when Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home, his community, and his livelihood on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast in 2005. He moved to Florida in 2007 to be with siblings in Cocoa Beach. Three years later, when surfing the Internet on a Wednesday, nostalgic for drive-ins, Watzke came across an abandoned theater in Ocala. By Monday, he signed a deal to take it over.

In his tenth year at the helm of Ocala Drive-In, Watzke is navigating the unthinkable again: a deadly pandemic that brought much of life as we knew it to a standstill. In the past year, his perseverance has made Watzke an interview subject for reporters and movie bloggers worldwide; meanwhile Ocala Drive-In has vaulted into the upper reaches of cinemas in North America in terms of gross sales, albeit in a market truncated by COVID-19. “I remember after Katrina there was nothing,” Watzke says in the thick drawl of his native New Orleans. “It’s one thing if your house burns down. You’ve still got your community. But when you lose everything from schools to shopping to your infrastructure—everything—it’s a strange feeling. So after Katrina, I thought about that during this. If you found something that would bring you one hour of feeling normal, it’d make a world of difference. This [Ocala Drive-In] was that normal for people.”

Watzke ia a picture show lifer. The movies became the family business in 1913, when his grandfather worked at the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans. Watzke learned the business at the elbow of his father, who made the rounds of some 300 Gulf- State Theaters as an engineer.

The younger Watzke began his career at 13, walking both fields of the two-screen Do Drive-In in New Orleans with a wheelbarrow, checking boxy car speakers and repairing the duds. At best, Watzke says, the audio quality “was never better than a transistor radio.”

“They were constantly breaking,” he recalls. “People were stealing them. There were so many downfalls from them old speakers.”

Mid-20th century audio technology also brought Watzke into close contact with the insect world. Ants used it as a conveyance, marching up poles, over wires and down receivers into Pontiac Bonnevilles, Oldsmobile Cutlasses, and AMC Javelins. And then there were the wasps. “I can’t count,” Watzke recalls about getting stung opening the poles to change the speakers, “how many times a whole damn nest of wasps was in there.”

Watzke followed his grandfather and father and became a projectionist, a job that technology would put into the dustbin with “elevator operator” and “filling station attendant.” He learned early the importance of anticipating market shifts.

Ocala Drive-In owner John Watzke

“A lot of drive-ins didn’t change with the times,” he says. “A lot of drive-ins did major change and didn’t have the feel of the old drive-ins. What I tried to do in renovating this place—and it’s a constant renovation—was to preserve as much of the original feel as I could, yet merge in the new technology.”

The Illinois-based owner of Ocala Drive-In, which sat vacant for seven years, was reluctant to sell in 2010, according to Watzke, because of a “bad experience” with the previous management. Watzke says he negotiated a lease with an option, and he and his brother jumped in and spent a year refurbishing the drive-in, which premiered in 1948, before reopening in July 2011.

“I operated with the original Brenkert projector that was in here when the place was built,” Watzke recalls. “It was a 1948 projector in here. My brother actually took it apart and went through the whole thing.”

The Brenkert gave way to a $92,000 Christie 2230 digital— high-definition, 4K compatible, with a 6,000-watt light bulb. Patrons now get sound through FM car audio. In 2016, Watzke added a second Christie for a second screen, 23-by-50 feet, facing the original screen, which is 42-by-90 feet.

“The major movies, Disney and Warner Bros. and all, they wanted you to keep a movie for four weeks, Watzke explains. “Well, if you have only one screen and you keep a movie for four weeks, you’re limiting your return.”

Watzke estimates he has invested half a million dollars in renovating. Meanwhile he has kept admission constant: $6 for adults and $3 for children 6 to 12 for a double-feature.

He thought he'd seen just about everything in cinemas—not to mention life—when the world got to know the novel coronavirus in early 2020.

Watzke says he never gave a thought to closing.

“You’re in your house with your family and you want to go to Wal-Mart or Home Depot with your family, why couldn’t you come here?” he says. “A drive-in theater is an extension of your living room. “All the walk-in theaters had closed,” Watzke continues. “The drive-ins in the North had not opened yet, and the ones in the South that were open panicked and closed. I told them if they closed, they would not reopen until somebody gave them permission. It happened exactly that way.”

Watzke closed every other of the drive-in’s 440 bays, but reopened all later. He still requests mask-wearing in the snack bar and insists on 6-feet spaces in line.

His perseverance attracted international attention in April 2020, when someone on the Internet posted that all of the $1,710 in sales from the top-grossing movie of the week—the independent horror movie, “Swallow,” starring Haley Bennett—came from Ocala Drive-In. Journalists from all over began pestering Watzke.

He sat for an interview with Michel Martin of NPR’s “All Things Considered” in April 2020 with the air of a bemused box office champ by default.

“Never in the day thought that I would be the top in the box office,” Watzke told Martin. “But I ended up the only one in the box office, so it’s not hard to be the top if you’re the only one.”

Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with Comscore, a global media tracker based in Los Angeles, says Ocala Drive- In actually was not the only theater in the market during the early COVID shutdown. However he says Comscore’s data paint a remarkable portrait of Ocala Drive-In. Between the weeks of March 13 and March 20 of last year, the number of theaters showing movies decreased from 5,313 to 514. From March 20 to April 16 of last year, Ocala Drive-In ranked No. 12 among North American theaters in gross sales, according to Dergarabedian. For the corresponding period in 2019, the Ocala location ranked No. 184 among North American drive-ins and No. 3,500 among all theaters, he says.

Watzke says his decision to remain open inspired him to innovate in ways he’d dreamed for years. He claims he added a walk-up window by cutting it into a concession stand door three hours after an immune-comprised patron phoned to say he wanted to see a show but was afraid to walk into the snack bar. Watzke added to the menu a signature sandwich of New Orleans, the muffuletta. It’s ham, salami, mortadella, Swiss and provolone cheeses, topped with olive dressing on a 9 1/2- inch round Italian bread from Gambino’s Bakery in New Orleans. A whole sells for $16.95 and feeds about four.

“When completely done, and done the right way,” Watzke says, “it weighs right at 3 pounds and is the size of a birthday cake.”

His work on Ocala Drive-In gets good reviews from patrons.

The vehicle of Neal and Alexis Ogg of Inverness was among dozens in a recent Wednesday night crowd. The Oggs faced Screen 2 to watch “Nobody” and “The Unholy.” Neal, 46, grew up going to drive-ins in Waterloo, Iowa, and recently brought wife, Alexis, 30, to her first elsewhere in Florida.

“I like the way they have the screens set up,” Neal Ogg says of Ocala Drive-In. “I don’t like the ones that are like four screens. It’s distracting, because you can see another screen on the periphery. The snacks are good. The prices are good. I think this is great.”

Watzke has also used the COVID year to connect to the community. He rented Ocala Drive-In to the Ocala Metro Chamber & Economic Partnership for two socially-distanced breakfast meetings last summer, the first on May 20.

“That was the first event where people, in some way, shape, or form, were able to gather together,” recalls Kevin Sheilley, president/CEO of the CEP.

Watzke has hired the facility for church services and concerts. He donated its use to Marion Technical College’s licensed practical nursing program for a graduation “pinning” ceremony, inspired by his daughter, Alexis Jacobson, 21, who was unable to have a ceremony after completing her nursing studies at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Lynn Weber, director of the MTC program, notes that not only did Watzke not charge for use of the drivein and its staff, he was unable to show movies that night.

“We pulled it off and it was awesome,” Weber says. “People were honking their horns, driving on [U.S. 441], seeing the nurses on the big screen. I’ll never forget it.”

Watzke says he hopes the community will remember Ocala Drive-In as life edges back to something approaching normal. “COVID has been a bad experience for the entire world,” he says. “If anything good has come out of it, it’s the fact that it’s brought back awareness of the drive-ins.”

Suddenly, Watzke remembers—in the manner of someone recalling a forgotten grocery list item—that he’ll mark his tenth anniversary with Ocala Drive-In on July 29.

“I gotta start thinking about what I want to do,” he says. What’s one more bout of fast thinking to John Watzke?

‘The Unsung Heroes Of The Box Office’

In the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, drive-ins were “the unsung heroes of the box office” and could be poised for something of a renaissance, according to a global media analyst.

“The summer movie season in 2020 essentially didn’t exist but for the drive-ins,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with Comscore.

Comscore’s data show North American drive-ins accounted for 1.5 percent of total box office in March 2020. In April, the next month, drive-ins generated 93.5 percent. That share topped at least 80 percent through July.

“I want to give a lot of credit to every drive-in, including Ocala,” Dergarabedian says. “They were the ones showing movies when nobody else was out there or nobody else was able to.”

The 18-week summer season of 2020 in North America showed gross sales of $178 million, Dergarabedian says, adding that in all of 2019, drive-ins alone showed a gross of $181.6 million.

“I think many people, in a sense, forgot about the drive-ins or they may not have one near their homes,” he adds. “The pandemic reinvigorated the love and nostalgia for drive-ins and that may continue going forward.”